LG's BD300 Blu-ray gets HD Netflix-enabling firmware update

by Darren Murph, posted Dec 18th 2008 at 9:19AM

First came Samsung's duo, then came the TiVo. Now, LG's BD300 is taking its turn, just as we were promised it would. Available now, the vBD8.11.480 firmware update will take your deck to the next level by solving the following symptom: "Netflix HD streaming is not supported." The update is also said to "fix the menu flickering when RMC key is served on the BD-Live menu," so yeah, there's that. Get that update going and report back, will you? Oh, and keep a close eye on quality -- we hear it's been wonky of late.

[Thanks, Jerry]

Filed under: Blu-ray, Players, Internet

Tags: bd, BD300, blu-ray, blu-ray player, Blu-rayPlayer, films, firmware, hd netflix, hd rentals, hd streaming, HdNetflix, HdRentals, HdStreaming, lg, movies, netflix, rent, rental, renting, stream, streaming, update

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

JERRY BRYANT @ Dec 18th 2008 9:43AM

I did the upgrade and the first time I started playing Pans Labyrinth it was a little muddy, I stopped and restarted the movie and HD showed up! So for now its much better! Thanks LG for coming thru as promised.

Neutral

Spiza @ Dec 18th 2008 11:28AM

I've read bad things about this players video quality which have kept it from being of interest to me.

Neutral

kjnb @ Dec 18th 2008 12:50PM

where?

Neutral

Spiza @ Dec 18th 2008 8:13PM

The best review is from CNET, but you can also go over to the AVS forums and see more of the same. I haven't seen anything about netflix quality, but the samsung 2500 is a better upscaler and I read the bd300 had some problems with video on some BDs. Now the samsung player will have compatibility issues more than likely with BDs because that is historically true. The 300 does already have DTS-HD and DD-HD audio, the 2500 will have a firmware update to get DTS-HD at some point.

Neutral

J.Goodwin @ Dec 18th 2008 3:38PM

At this rate, the PS3 is likely to soon be the only Blu-ray player that can't access Netflix.

Neutral

dan @ Dec 18th 2008 6:46PM

Spiza- this player is awesome. it is our standard blu-ray that we sell nowadays. the streaming quality is great (even before this release) if you have a cablemodem, its good if you have a 6mbps dsl connection. anything lower than this, and the streaming may artifact and/or buffer. if clients still want to go high-end, we will sell them the denon players, but this is great for your average user. processor speed in the player itself is fast (read: fast boot-up and disc read times) and is highly recommended.

Neutral

Hawk @ Dec 19th 2008 7:44AM

I am getting this player for xmas. Actually I already have it, just cant open it yet. Can you update the firmware through the player (I have ethernet) or do you have to dl it?

Neutral

Adrian @ Dec 20th 2008 2:02AM

The LG update is done online, you can check for an update in the settings menu if it doesn't tell you its a mandatory update and go there itself.

I like my LG, and the Netflix picture quality got better with the update, I have 3Mbit DSL and the lower speed HD needs 2.6Mbit so that just works and looks pretty good. Standard def is 1.5Mbit at the best quality (these are the new VC1 format streams, lower bandwidth and better quality - there is a detailed explanation of Netflix streaming formats at blog.netflix.com a few weeks ago).

Neutral

Hawk @ Dec 22nd 2008 12:04PM

Cool, thx

Neutral

SAS_bg @ Dec 31st 2008 12:21PM

When I did this update I have neither Netflix nor Cyrillic subtitles in the DivX movies. I'm from Bulgaria and I need Cyrillic sub.
May be LG did not think about Cyrillic support.
I wrote to them , but no answer , so far.

Is it possible to downgrade to the Cyrillic supported ROM , and where I can download it from ?

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